EMPLOYMENT: Some Blue-Collar Workers Probably Shouldn’t Do Pink Jobs.
Why can’t a woman be more like a man? Henry Higgins demands to know in “My Fair Lady.” These days, labor economists are asking the opposite question: Why can’t a man be more like a woman?
The decline of traditionally male blue-collar work like manufacturing has left many men adrift. There are growth industries, such as health care, where some of these men could get work. But they don’t seem to be taking advantages of the splendid opportunities to become home health care aides or day care workers. In part that’s because many of these jobs don’t start out paying as well as the manufacturing jobs these men have lost or had hoped to gain. But in part it seems to be because the work isn’t … well … manly enough.
“It’s not a skill mismatch, but an identity mismatch,” economist Lawrence Katz told the New York Times. “It’s not that they couldn’t become a health worker, it’s that people have backward views of what their identity is.”
This seems unnecessarily dismissive. If Katz lost his job as an economist, and had to take one changing the diapers of elderly patients, I’ve no doubt that he would find this emotionally difficult, but I wouldn’t say that this is because his preferences for his current occupation are “backward.” The patient-care work is necessary, and should be honored. It’s also, let’s be honest, much less pleasant than sitting in an office and writing about what other people should do with their working lives.
Moreover, people invest a lot in building up a professional identity, which helps make the work more bearable (and, by giving people pride in what they do, probably ensures that the work is better done). Suddenly abandoning something that has constituted a major part of who you are, and taking a job at the bottom of a new field, is not any easier for a machinist or a coal miner than it would be for a professional.
Plus:
I wish I had a better idea what Plan B was. But the solution that economists and policy wonks have been pushing for decades — more education and transition into service work — is manifestly not working for a lot of people. Indeed, it sounds a lot like professional identity politics: The experts say that the solution to all problems is for everyone to be more like them.
Some related thoughts here.